Residents look to 'keep Brockton beautiful” on Saturday

BROCKTON – Saturday is going to be a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

That is because the city will be celebrating its 10th annual “Keep Brockton Beautiful Day.”

The event, which is hosted by Mayor Bill Carpenter’s office, the City Council’s Beautification Committee and the Department of Public Works, invites residents to clean up a section of the city.

“It has a big effect on Brockton,” said Patrick Sullivan, the head of DPW’s Refuse Section and one of the founders of the event. “We pull in probably several tons of litter on that day just by picking it up a piece at a time.”

While attendance varies with the weather, hundreds typically take part in the event, said Sullivan, who is predicting a turnout of somewhere between 700 and 800.

Temperatures are expected to hover in the mid-to-high 60s and skies are expected to be partly cloudy.

“It’s the Super Bowl of community collaboration,” said Noube Rateau, Carpenter’s director of communications. “You have all different groups of people coming together across the city for one cause, which is a beautiful thing.”

As of Wednesday, Rateau said over 300 people from across the city had registered for the event, with more expected to register on Saturday.

In addition to help cleaning up Brockton, Sullivan said the event often helps people create a stronger bond to their city.

“One of the goals is to have people take ownership of the city and take pride in an area that they worked so hard to keep clean,” Sullivan said.

Often the result is that the cleaning continues beyond just Keep Brockton Beautiful Day with participants coming back months later to ask the city for help in cleaning up a certain area again.

“The people put in three hours cleaning up a certain spot and every time they drive by they remember that and how hard they worked and they don’t want it to get messy again,” Sullivan said.

Registration for the event will be held from 7:30 to 9 a.m., at Heights Crossing, 35 Christy Place.

The cleaning will take place from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., and residents can either request to clean up a specific location in the city or they will be assigned to an area. Cleaning equipment will be provided.